A free consult costs the practice a chair, a scan and an hour of a treatment coordinator. Paid media that fills the schedule with consults that never start treatment looks busy in the report and loses money in the chair.
The gap between a consult and a start is where most of the money goes.
The platforms learn from whatever you count. Count form fills and they find people who fill forms. The signal that matters is the patient who starts treatment, and it rarely gets back to the account.
An adult searching for clear aligners decides alone and compares price. A parent searching for braces for a child decides on trust and timing. One budget, one set of ads and one page serve neither.
The broad aligner terms are crowded with national brands that buy at a scale no single practice can match. Chasing them drains the budget before the local searches get funded.
People comparing braces and aligners want a range and a payment plan before they book. A page that hides both sends the comparison to someone else.
Built around starts, treatment type and the local market you can actually win.
Adult aligners, teen braces and early treatment for children run separately, each with its own search terms, ads and page.
Consults that became starts are matched to the campaign and keyword that produced them, so budget follows treatment and not enquiries.
Budget goes to searches with a place or a provider in them before it goes to broad aligner terms.
Every consult request traced to the search that produced it, without sending patient details to the ad platforms.
Pages that show the treatment, a price range or payment plan and how the first visit works. Fixed scope, built for the campaigns. See landing pages and websites.
Three numbers side by side for each campaign, so you can see where patients drop.
Invisalign and other aligner names are trademarks, which can limit how they appear in ad text. Ads are written to work with or without the brand name.
Average cost per click on Google in the United States. The search with a place in it costs more than twice the brand search.
| Search term | Monthly searches | Average CPC |
|---|---|---|
| invisalign | 368,000 | $9.42 |
| braces near me | 40,500 | $20.43 |
| clear aligners | 18,100 | $14.00 |
| braces for adults | 14,800 | $16.58 |
| adult orthodontics | 4,400 | $13.97 |
Source: Google Ads data for the United States via DataForSEO, read on October 13, 2026. National averages for the last twelve months.
I have not published an orthodontic case, and I would rather say so than borrow one. This is what is real.
Different industry, included because the numbers are public and verifiable. Roughly $20K per month in Google Ads spend, in a market with $45 to $80 CPCs. Read the case.
I have also worked in paid media in healthcare. Nothing from that work is published on this site. No employer is named, and there are no budgets, results or internal details.
What carries over is the method. Conversions are defined as booked work, calls are tracked to the keyword, and bids are set against what a customer is worth.
I go through the account, the tracking and the path a patient takes from search to appointment and tell you what is broken. The findings are yours whether or not we keep working together.
Tracking, conversion actions and structure get corrected first. Optimising on top of bad data just makes you confidently wrong.
Campaigns, ad copy and landing pages built around how patients actually search, and around what the platform rules allow.
Weekly optimisation against booked appointments rather than form fills, with a monthly written read on what moved and what is next.
Longer reads on this topic from the blog.
Orthodontic practices that track starts and have chair time to fill.
Not a fit. Practices that cannot say which consults became starts and do not want to track it.
The start, not the consult request. Consults are worth tracking as a step, and so are the patients who show up. But budget decisions should be made on cost per start, because that is the number that pays for the campaign.
In October 2026 the United States average was $9.42 for invisalign, $14.00 for clear aligners, $16.58 for braces for adults and $20.43 for braces near me. These are national averages, and your market can sit above or below them.
Carefully. Those searches are large and crowded with national advertisers, and the brand names are trademarks that can restrict ad text. They earn a small, tightly targeted share of the budget after local searches are covered.
They can, mostly for adult aligners and for parents, where the decision takes weeks and a search may never happen. Meta limits the targeting and the conversion data health advertisers can use, so the campaign is judged on consults and starts you can count yourself.
I have not published an orthodontic case, so I will not claim one. I have also worked in paid media in healthcare, and the published numbers on this site come from a home services company in Houston. The method is the same one, applied to consults and starts.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
Rather book a time directly? Schedule a call.